City, county, Metro announce settlements from gulf oil spill

Published 5:41 am, Thursday, July 23, 2015

PRESS RELEASE

Harris County, the City of Houston and METRO announced today their respective shares of the $18.7 billion settlement among BP Plc, the federal government, five Gulf Coast states and other local governments to resolve claims arising from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon incident.

The City of Houston will receive $12,155,549 for lost hotel tax and sales tax revenues. METRO will receive $9,224,113 for lost sales tax revenue. Harris County will receive $2.1 million for lost hotel occupancy tax revenues.

Cities, counties and other governments throughout the Gulf coast have been meeting since July 2nd to approve the proposed settlement which is still subject to the final approval of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. That final approval is expected to come within the next few days.

The district court had ordered local officials to keep individual amounts confidential until the final approval of the settlement but that order was relaxed this week to allow the City, County, and Metro to disclose the settlement amounts.

The global settlement resolved all federal and state claims that came out of the Deepwater Horizon accident and included agreements with Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas and local governments. BP’s settlement also includes a $5.5 billion civil penalty to be paid over the next 15 years under the Clean Water Act.

The City, County, and Metro were among the more than 500 local governmental entities that filed claims seeking to be compensated for economic losses suffered as a result of that spill.